I'm an LA-based writer and management consultant. I was an adviser and editor for many years for the father of modern leadership studies, the late USC professor Warren Bennis. And over the past twenty years, I’ve been a chief storyteller for USC, during a time in which Bennis and other leaders helped it skyrocket in global reputation and productivity. I bring a different perspective to leadership--some sober perspective about the realities of being "in charge," along with advice on how to tell great stories that mobilize great communities. I've written for dozens of publications around the world, including the Chicago Tribune, Christian Science Monitor and Japan Times. I serve as a University Fellow at USC’s Center for Public Diplomacy and am a member of the Pacific Council for International Policy. My book Leadership Is Hell (Figueroa Press, 2014) is available on Amazon; all proceeds benefit programs that make college accessible to promising LA urban schoolchildren.

Incompetence Rains, Er, Reigns: What The Peter Principle Means Today

You may think you’ve heard the Peter Principle before—something to the effect that, “In a hierarchy, every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence.”

But the Peter Principle was more than an alarmingly nasty motto. It was an alarmingly nasty book—and a funny one at that, illustrating the efforts of many managers to seem productive when in fact they’re in over their heads.

Published nearly a half-century ago, the book is now a refreshing tonic for all the feel-good, impossibly Pollyannaish management wisdom being passed around.

The Peter Principle wasn’t titled in honor an incompetent manager named Pete. It was created by Laurence J. Peter, a prominent Canadian scholar of education, who noticed it, began to lecture about it, and was finally egged on to write in more detail about it. Rather than penning a scholarly tract, however, he offered up a straight-faced satirical treatment. It’s as if the book were being narrated by Leslie Nielsen circa “Airplane.”

The RMS Titanic, in better days. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Here are the core principles of Peter’s bungling world of management:

1. When you’re great at something, you might get rewarded with a promotion … into something you’re terrible at. A typical example, Peter said, is if you’re a great rule-follower who suddenly is placed in charge of making rules and decisions. You may well freeze up in your new role or gum up the productivity of everyone else.

2. Once you’re promoted to your level of incompetence, you probably won’t get fired and replaced with someone more competent. Instead, others will work around you. Why aren’t you fired? Perhaps because you probably know too much about your boss’ business to be booted out too casually. Or because people have sympathy for you because you’re working so many hours. Or because the people who are supposed to judge you have reached their own level of incompetence, and damned if they’re able to realize how unproductive you are. So you now have reached the ominously termed station called “Final Placement.”

3. When you’re competent, even a dummy can see your output. And you’re being rewarded for that output. But once you’re reached incompetence, there’s little or no output from you. At this point, you’ll be judged by your input—by how early you arrive at the office, by how cheerful you are, by how you’re a good citizen. Rest assured, incompetence is usually not enough to get you fired; only “super-incompetence” is enough to get you fired. And, ironically, “super-competence” will get you fired too, because now you’re just making everyone else look bad. As Peter said, the hierarchy must be protected at all costs.

4. Incompetence is perhaps inevitable. So you have to decide whether you want to rush toward the oblivion of Final Placement (it does have its share of perks and benefits, after all). Or you have to decide whether you want to forestall it as long as you can.

5. If you do decide to rush into a sterile future, Peter said you need to exercise the power of “pull”—by attaching yourself to superiors who can help pull you up quickly. And he offered some unnervingly witty advice on how to manipulate them into a promotion.

6. If you’re smart enough to realize that you don’t want to be pulled up the ladder to career limbo, you’ll find a happy place where you can be productive and useful, and you’ll fight like hell to avoid getting promoted.

You can’t just refuse promotions, Peter said. It creates too many problems. Instead, you have to incompetent fire with incompetent fire, by mastering the art of “creative incompetence.”

This magnificent, high art involves preemptively scuttling your chances for promotion. You do this by demonstrating incompetence at something irrelevant, something that won’t get you fired, but which will get you removed from the short list for upper management. Peter offered a few helpful suggestions, such as being marginally rude to the boss’ spouse at the holiday party, dressing just slightly inappropriately, or occasionally accidentally parking in the CEO’s spot.

7. Because incompetence is inevitable, we shouldn’t be trying to fire all the incompetent managers. We’d only replace them with deadwood anyway. And being a social species, we realize these people have families to feed, cars to buy and vacations to take. They’re job-creators, if you will. Peter argued that incompetent people will do the least damage to competent people’s productivity if we maintain the benign illusion that they’re useful and have a bright future.

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GREAT post Rob!! I wrote something about this not too long ago. You raise some very interesting points, my only question remains is how do people who lack the competence/training/development even get into roles with significant responsibility??? Thanks again for the post! http://ah2andbeyond.com/never-let-crisis-go-wasteunless-youre-incompetent/ www.ah2andbeyond.com

Thanks, Andre’! I think that what happens is that people wrongly assume that talented people will rise up to any new challenge. And so great teachers and doctors and artists and writers get promoted into management/administration, which they may be terrible at, and which requires them to suppress some of the skills that served them well before. I’ve written about this a lot, but I was shocked to see how concisely Peter had illustrated the whole process back in the late 1960s…!

This article resonates Nobel Prize Winner Professor Daniel Kahneman’s book, “Thinking, Fast and Slow”, the Tale of Two Systems. The rational (automatic and effortless) and emotional (reflective and planned effort) thinking, and associated tensions tied to decision making. In his book, Professor Kahneman explains how bad decision making results from being self-confident and biased, whereas being self-aware and unbiased results in quality decision making. The sooner we realize our biases and make decisions based on truths, there will always be need for a third party. True to Professor Kahneman’s book, is the “Peter Principle”, and the way you highlight transgressing into a world of incompetence (sought through our own desires), a rather vicious circle of seeking continuous ways of failing to appreciate competence. Thank you for this interesting read Rob.